"But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, ...and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel." (Heb. 12: 22, 24)

Here is a sampling from my 78-sonnet sequence, The Desert Is for Wooing: Sonnets from the Exile, which I began on February 21st, 2016, and completed on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September 14th, 2016. Our Lady of Glastonbury is patroness of my poetry, to whom I am so grateful.

By a Fugitive Light

On the Second Sunday of Lent, 2016

“And it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.”

—Ezekiel 2:10

A tower kept me, so I stayed, to look

Upon the drama of a world unbooked.

“O watchman bound, three years and more behold

The exile lordly glory lets unfold,

To say a word on absence and on shame,

On warfare, loveless cold, and on a flame

That shudders, yet survives in trembling ray,

Upwelling that heart there, and here at play,

A dew of light, this slight array, despite

The sharp dismay of what seems endless night.”

Then came to me the world enscrolled, wherein

By sorrow, I see wisdom, love begin.

So did the cherub wheels forsake our stain,

Or darkly by a candle life remain?

Coriolis Effect

“There is a world elsewhere.”

—Shakespeare, Coriolanus

I asked, “Should you take all that you propose,

What would be left of me for you to thrall?”

Yet they came anyway, to overthrow,

With clamoring of exile. I recall

The chisels gouging my once honored name

Off stelae. They were thorough. And I spat.

I howled, “I banish you!” But they remained.

Withershins from Rome, I ended up, and sat.

This loneliness has had me for its food;

What I have held most dear is being bled.

You say to scan a motion through dark wood,

Inertial frames and cloaked force must be read.

Please give me eyes to see this strange effect:

A falling body plumbs but Thy hanged depths.

The following was a 2016 RhymeZone Poetry Prize winner (first in the rhyming category).

Sundays with Anaximander

This zero hour, drawn up in arms, began

Before today’s alarms. It was perhaps

When for the pines, You primed a caravan.

They sang of Beulah land; they fought collapse.

That was my church, was baptized there. It burned,

Returning to the limitless. Thus time

Its levy makes. But music stayed, and spurned

Night: “we’ll understand it all, by and by.”

Aunt Mildred had prepared pot roast. The sweet,

Sweet tea, in plastic pitchers went around.

The eighth day dawned, it dawns, and with it fleets

All days since chaos was by Spirit drowned.

The throne awaits, the river and the trees,

For us to fall, to rise, and be received.

To an Unknown Love

It took me forty years lashed to the mast

To fathom that the tune was not for me—

No female charm to swallow up my past,

No warmth, no bourne, no partnered ecstasy.

O Mother Mary, womanless days screech.

Such marred machinery opaques your care.

Would you my heart and some hers heart come teach

How finally to bow, to stay, to bear?

Unworthy am I, I well know, but grace

Is what I seek—a touch, a tender eye,

To raise my head again, my self displace,

Our love so patient, kind, to make shame die.

Lady, you sing the song now beckoning me—

May I hope another joins the melody?

Flying Fortress

For my father

How cold it must have been those three dozen sorties;

How loud, within the belly of the dragon;

How quiet, floating down a thousand stories;

And colder, when your friend was strafed and slackened.

It ruined you. You couldn’t drink enough

To exorcise the gelid cacophony.

You fathered freedom, though, and, in that, us,

Crushed the rage that slaughtered Jews so savagely.

Still, I can’t keep a father. They all go.

Joseph, David’s son, could you foster me?

Of my unquiet bapa, too, take custody?

And ward my children’s own unpatroned woe?

Would that the festal, gliding, glinting ranks

Drop soundless fire upon these orphaned banks.

The Republic on the Glassy Sea (Easter, 2016)

I.

O Angel of America, how tides

The Sunday news upon this continent?

The song of dignity the times divide,

From Christic archē to each countenance.

On Cadillac, I see ancient light emerge;

Afresh, the nation wakes arcadian.

Can we be new again? Can hope converge

With classic virtue, arcing radiance?

The modern needs tradition to progress,

And yet Enlightened minds relinquish books,

Extinguish pilgrim faith, and politesse.

Even ardency to forge have we forsook.

A liberty that serves, creates, and prays—

O Angel, have we cast it all away?

II.

No rising but in falling, none at all—

Vulnerability the sole capacity.

This we forgot: our freedom is installed

That we may spend ourselves audaciously.

The King of all there is has made it known:

The halt repatriation of world’s power

Occurs but through the reconciling throes

Of unrequited love’s most gallant hour.

O citizen, would you republic keep?

Let’s advocate without partisanship.

The dead and with the downtrod let us weep,

And pioneer a fasting stewardship.

True lofty romance fruits in solidarity,

And stakes its treasure to embrace posterity.

III.

Yeats saw what his beloved would dismiss:

Poetry, not insurrection, renovates.

The middle terms are love and politics,

Which premise Dante’s course to elevate.

We must be people of deliberation—

Nihilistic action cannot reach conclusion.

Wonder, friendship, taste, grace: such constellations

Could wake elites, and us, from strong illusion.

What’s needed? Spiritual force republicans—

Not furies of resentment and despair,

From pain that’s surely there, but peregrines

That range the crests and falls of life with flair.

The wings of Spirit vortex, vertex from above

An edifice of thinking, thanking, and of love.

IV.

Ambiguous, still, Pax American

Has aegised progress, thwarted tyrannies.

Yet Sallust knew, the high republican

Morality fails with hegemony.

Righteous Cato wards the mountain we must climb,

For holiness and liberty aren’t two.

Christ died to make men free. Redeem the time:

Frack saeculum; fill all with azured dew.

So I to self, to you. This polity

Is charged to us: let’s make it new, encore.

Suave Angel, manner us to comity,

Transmit, from orders higher, heaven’s more.

What is democracy that can’t impart

Aristocracy to every mind and heart?

V.

The lamp of freedom once went westering

And spanned in dawn these hemispheric lands.

Angel, have you horned the fire, sequestering?

When will it come, dropping slow from your hands?

The worlding engines of our cities, plains

Like inland seas of bloom, and mountainous

Ambitions fine and fell: such scope us veins—

Our ministry should yield more bounteously.

Sad Watcher, helpless you must feel as we

Flee wisdom’s legacy of arts, fine prose,

Philosophy, cosmic liturgy. Self enemy

We are, inapt. Plead Him Who saves His foes.

Atlantic dreams of golden ages linger;

Pacific make us, everyone a singer.

Great Pan Is Dead

“The shepherds on the lawn,/Or ere the point of dawn,/Sat simply chatting in a rustic row;/Full little thought they then,/That the mighty Pan/Was kindly come to live with them below…”

—Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

“Sing, refugee, of all that comes to be.”

We’re straitened for the pressing out of song,

But in the eternal solitudes of love we plead,

“Now, future!”—slow its kerning, brooding world-long.

We don’t begin with fruit, but end with it,

So genesis was always bound to wait

Upon apocalypse. I want to sit

Beneath the evergreens, and harp, and play

Till evening with my kids, my shield uphung

On gummy boughs, the lightning bugs so bright

In quantum constellation, you’d think they’d sprung

From smoldering celestial timber, as flights

Of shaken, drowsy embers. Suffering makes us light;

So, we exist, in gardens still invisible,

And dirge the leaping God, the All, who’s ever

Been the singer, the truth of things thought mythical.

By mystic chords, He piers with sun the world’s endeavor.

A backwards-streaming dawn the final womb:

Which side the night, this gloaming of the tomb?

The Seraph in the Wilderness

On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

pues así llegué a saber

que toda la dicha humana,

en fin, pasa como sueño.

For thus I’ve come to know

That all of human bliss,

In the end, passes like a dream.

—Calderón, Life is a Dream

I asked for faith and came the dark instead,

With furies to howl away my gist and marrow—

Children, name, utility, caress, and bed:

In repression’s tower this Sigismund’s been barrowed.

I was supposed to turn it into song,

But the abandonment has been prolonged.

What is real? Love? Justice? Mercy? Providence?

What of this seraph fire within my veins?

Only God Who bleeds in us still warrants confidence;

The rest is nada, what refuses to remain.

Transfixed by us, Christ dwells as covert food—

Take…eat…my body...blood…covenant…for you—

The very savor, substance of reality:

If words will mean again, must mean like these;

If touch will come again, as Pentecostal breeze.

A single mourning dove escorts our plight, and coos:

A lover courts by night, and in the desert woos.

The following poems come from the second manuscript I have completed, entitled Relic Radiation: Poems in Protology.